The Livewell Clinic- January 2018

A healthy human body isn’t born with a nutrient deficiency. Over millions of years, we have evolved to start with optimal natural function, giving us every chance to survive. It’s only as we “rust” and age that dysfunction sets in, whether from trauma, unhealthy habits, or natural deterioration. Traditional medicine fails to address this dysfunction properly. Instead of trying to reverse the cycle and uproot the problem at the deepest level, most doctors coddle the disorder, doing nothing more than temporarily containing it. I can’t count the number of patients who show up in our office after bouncing between traditional medical systems. Even the most ardent skeptics of functional medicine can get fed up with the ordinary medical track when they're shunted from one specialist to the next without any relief. When four different “experts” assure you there’s nothing wrong with you, despite an illness that you feel, viscerally, each and every day of your life, eventually you’re going to go seek another treatment plan. One of my patients started out as one of these functional medicine skeptics. One day, a couple came into the clinic with a problem that had been afflicting both of them for years. The husband struggled with severe joint pain and chronic fatigue, to the point where it was affecting his day- to-day happiness and their relationship. Other physicians had put him on a battery of medications that affected his mood and bodily functions. After the issue had come to a head, the husband agreed to see us, despite brushing off our work as nothing more than expensive vitamin treatments — all to support his wife. Knowing he’d be loath to accept anything else, I put him on a simple treatment plan and had him tweak a few aspects of his diet, along with a few extra nutrients to get him back to baseline. He protested, “I don’t want to do this. This is all basic stuff, but it’s so expensive. I don’t even know if it’s gonna work!” But at his wife’s behest, he agreed to continue with the treatment.

Two weeks later, my patient’s wife called. She told me that in just a short time, her husband had lost several pounds (indicative of improving health, in his case) and was already starting to feel remarkably better. Soon after, he returned to his other medical providers and showed them the results of our treatment. They took him off all the medicine he’d been taking for so long. “I haven’t been off medicine in years; and now, in three weeks, I’m done!” he told me. After that, they both jumped fully into our ongoing treatment plans. After months, they’ve told me they’re both much happier and healthier, their marriage is stronger, and they have a cohesive feeling of working toward the same goal. She told me she hadn’t seen him so upbeat and engaged for years. It was a massive deal. It’s a shame there are so many myths out there in the medical community about the work we do, but I’m more than confident in our functional medicine practices. After seeing what that couple went through, it would be impossible not to. It’s why I come into the clinic each day. We don’t just put a bandage on a massive dysfunction in the body. Instead, we restore healthy function to the greatest degree possible. It gives us the power to not only help our patients relieve their problems, but to fundamentally transform their lives in the process.